Masks of Anarchy
by FilthyGuttersnipe
Summary: Dunwall heaves in the midst of chaos. An empress is assassinated and her disgraced bodyguard must fight to clear his name, an eldritch anarchist plots revolution and a Watch captain finds his loyalty and morals put to the ultimate test. AU of Dishonored through multiple perspectives, Low(ish) Chaos Corvo, plus OCs
1. Chapter 1

Masks of Anarchy

Chapter 1

_One of the most fascinating things about life is, I find, beginnings. The 'what' may be the meat of the matter, but every what is preceded by a 'why'. _Why_ is this so, and not that? _Why_ did such events proceed in such a way?_

_The what that I speak of is an interesting one. Fascinating, in fact, a few short weeks of anarchy and revolution when an empire hung in the balance, when the fate of millions was held in the hands of just a few. But why this happened, where it started, is a question that is difficult to answer._

_Perhaps, you might say, it began with the whales and with Esmond Roseburrow, with the oil that which made Dunwall's fortune and poisoned the city. Perhaps it started with Hiram Burrows' plot against the poor. Perhaps it started when a man outside Dunwall's designated infection zone grew sick with a fever, on the day that it passed when he wept blood and stumbled from his home without a mind. Maybe it was the day Jenny Aching first put on her mask and ran through the night streets of Dunwall with a smoking pistol in her hand and blade soaked in a watchman's blood. Or perhaps it began with a shot fired by Lucas Cornell, a shot that would haunt him for the rest of his life._

_These are all small reasons why the momentous events of Dunwall's most tumultuous weeks began. Why the major players took to the stage. There was one moment when the alchemical formula of these events were poured into a catalyst, a day when it all came to a head, when the blood of an empress was spilled, when an oath of vengeance was taken, when conspiracy came to a head, that all of these small whys came together in that one moment where the lever tipped on the fulcrum and everything changed._

_Sit back, dear reader, and let me tell you a tale._

The whaling ship was a predator just like its prey. Huge, unwieldy, slow, lumbering, yet dignified and majestic in spite of this. Coasting along the Wrenhaven Estuary, a dying leviathan trussed up in its slaughter-harness, butchers scurrying across its body like flies.

For Corvo Attano, there was no stronger reminder that he was back in Dunwall.

The engine of the small boat he was in puttered as it made its way towards Dunwall Tower, hull cutting through the water and the technicolour membrane of industrial scum that smothered the river. He ignored the chatter of the driver and ship's officer who shared the boat with him, focussing his gaze on the city on the far bank, the squalid sprawl of brick houses and factories, grubby and tight-packed as a rat's nest. Behind him, on the near shore, the fortification of white stone that was Dunwall Tower rose up high, gleaming in the weak morning sun and stark contrast to the rest of the city.

"Mind if I ask if you brought back any good news on the plague, Lord?" the driver asked. "Been all we've been talking about back here in Dunwall."

"Classified," Corvo replied, his hand touching the left side of his breast where the letter lay in the inner pocket of the indigo coat he wore. "Empress' eyes only."

"Yeah, thought so," the man shrugged, the epaulettes of his City Watch uniform rising and falling with the movement. "Can't blame a man for asking."

He cut the engine as the boat drew towards a tower in the side of fortress-palace, drifting through the doorway in its side, leading out to the water. As the boat came through, prow bumping against the far wall, Corvo scanned the waterline on instinct, looking for places where potential intruders might climb up and into the palace.

"Ho there!" the officer called up. "Bring us up!"

"Getting her ready!" someone else replied, hidden from view by the long square pit between the entrance and the rest of the building. "Turning on the pipes...and she's rising."

Water gushed from pipes and faucets in the walls, spray splashing up from other side and causing the boat's three occupants to raise their arms to protect themselves.

"I hate this damn system," the driver grumbled as they rose. "Couldn't they just use a winch or something? Gonna stink of riverwater for the rest of the day."

Corvo remained silent, blinking away the spray that had collected on his lashes as the water elevator came to a halt. The room he had entered into was one he did not recognise, nor indeed did he recognise the tower that they had scaled in scant moments, something between a boathouse and a pumping room. With disapproval, he noted the lack of spotlights on the water around the building's base, the absence of armed guards and the fact that no challenge had been given; laxity had grown in his absence. He would take it up with Jessamine later; he knew that her response would most likely be to laugh and tell him that he hadn't changed a bit, but she would implement his recommendations nonetheless.

The guards on duty, clad in their distinctive domed helmets and indigo uniforms much like his own, saluted Corvo as he passed them, the Lord Protector returning the gesture with a nod as he stepped onto the white stone bridge that connected the pump house with the rest of Dunwall Tower. He had no time for formality, no time for anything else, simply getting the message to Jessamine as quickly as possible. He knew that today would be a busy day, that there would be much planning for the days and weeks and months ahead and that he would be needed-

The young girl dressed in white who appeared at the far end of the bridge cut off that train of thought in a moment. Although he was not a man who smiled often, Corvo smiled as she ran into his open arms, lifting Emily Kaldwin up as if she weighed nothing, whirling her around him and pulling her close for an embrace. She kissed him on his cheek, ignoring the rough stubble that he had lacked the time to shave off that morning, hugging him close before Corvo finally set her down.

"I can't believe you're back!" Emily declared, smiling and bouncing on her feet. "What was your journey like? Did you see any whales? Were there pirates? What was Morley like, and Serkonos and Tyvia? Was there anyone with an eyepatch and a peg leg? Did you-"

Corvo held up a hand in an attempt to stem the flow of questions.

"Later, Emily," he said. "I promise I will answer all of your questions later."

"Right, right, of course," Emily nodded, enthusiasm barely faded. "I want to hear all about it, though. Can we play hide and seek, then?"

Corvo blinked; he had forgotten how Emily would sometimes jump from subject to subject with the same ease and swiftness as a veteran sailor clambering between ropes.

"Later," he said, the letter in his pocket like an anchor dragging him to duty. Emily's face fell.

"Promise?" she asked.

Corvo's finger traced an 'X' over his heart, and Emily smiled. In her eyes, that was as good a promise as an Overseer's oath taken in Holger Square, and with the reassurance that they could play her favourite game later, she took his hand.

"Come on," she said, hurrying along with Corvo in her wake. "Mother's in the garden, talking to that nasty old spymaster again."

It was a strange sight; a tall, olive-skinned Serkonan in the navy greatcoat of the Lord Protector, sword at his hip and an oil-lock pistol across his belt, being lead by the hand by a ten year-old girl in a white dress, towards the gardens of Dunwall Tower. There were a few guards that saluted him on his way, though they remained carefully expressionless at what they saw. Only one person on their route saw fit to address them.

"Corvo, back two days early, I see. This is certainly a surprise."

The countenance of the man who spoke was cruel, craggy features harsh and merciless as a sea gale, grand and intimidating in the crimson uniform of the High Overseer. His likeness was taking shape on a canvas before him, formed by the brush of the bearded painter at work, the famed inventor and artist Anton Sokolov.

"Campbell," Corvo nodded. "My work was done ahead of schedule. There was no reason to delay."

"In any case," Campbell said. "Welcome back."

The words were insincere, formalities and nothing else; neither Campbell nor Corvo had any love for each other, and the Lord Protector couldn't help but wonder what the High Overseer was doing at the tower. Having his portrait taken, of course, but that could have been done anywhere.

"Stop moving, Campbell," Sokolov grumbled from his painting. "And Corvo, welcome back from wherever you've been."

"All across the Isles," Campbell said. "Begging the other nations for aid."

"My elixir has that problem solved already," Sokolov said dismissively. "Now keep still, High Overseer."

"I'll leave you both to that," Corvo said as a farewell, letting Emily lead him on towards the garden.

"Is it just me?" she asked as they headed up the white steps. "Or does that painting not look much like Campbell?"

Any answer Corvo would have given died on his lips as they entered the small garden of Dunwall Tower. Beneath a domed pavilion supported by pillars of white stone, Empress Jessamine Kaldwin stood in argument with Hiram Burrows.

"They are sick people, not criminals," she was saying to her spymaster, a look of anger on her face.

"We have been over this before, your Majesty," Hiram said. "It moved past that point long ago."

"And what do you suggest?" Jessamine asked. "Besides, of course, mass murder of my people? That is not happening, Hiram; they are my citizens, and while there's hope of saving them there shall be no killing."

"Mother!" Emily called, hurrying to Jessamine's side. "Corvo is back!"

Jessamine glanced over her shoulder, and her face lit up as she saw Corvo, the Lord Protector bowing his head in acknowledgement.

"Spymaster, please leave us," she said. "And we shall not talk of this matter again."

"Of course, your Majesty, I suspect that we shall not," Hiram said, bowing low and stepping away. As he passed Corvo, he added; "Lord Protector."

"Spymaster."

With Hiram gone, Jessamine turned to the Lord Protector. There was eagerness in her eyes, tempered with a quiet, carefully concealed desperation, hope for a solution to the problem that was threatening to swallow Dunwall like a whale gulping down a shoal of hagfish. The look on Corvo's face as he handed her the letter quashed that hope even before she broke the seal.

Her expression darkened as she read, and after a moment, she let it drop on the floor.

"They're blockading us," she said. "They'll take no Gristol ships into their ports. They'll wait to see if we die of the plague or not, and they'll hasten the job by starving trade. I knew that this mission was a fool's hope."

She sighed a sigh that bubbled with frustration.

"Void take them," she said. "Every last one of the cowards."

"Mother, what's wrong?" Emily asked, tugging at the tail of Jessamine's jacket in worry. "Why are you sad?"

"I'm not, dear," Jessamine said. "I'm just...just tired after a busy morning, that's all."

The look on Emily's face showed that she believe that lie no more than she believed the sky to be pink, but she remained silent, resolved. Over the head of her daughter, Jessamine shot Corvo a despairing look, and the Lord Protector shrugged as if to say; _"We'll work something out."_

"Mother," Emily suddenly spoke, breaking out of her embrace with Jessamine and pointing to a rooftop. "Who's that, over there?"

In the distance, dark figures figures flitted over the tiles of Dunwall Tower's roofs, moving from one place to another with unnatural speed. Every movement seemed swift and certain with an undeniable malice, and Corvo's expression darkened as he saw the darting figures.

"Get behind me," he ordered, drawing blade and oil-lock. "Who in the Void are these-"

He was cut off when one of the figures appeared before him. Somehow the trespasser materialised from empty air, a figure in a gas mask and dark rain slicks arriving as if from the Void itself. Some men may have stopped at that moment, shocked by the impossible sight, but Corvo raised his pistol and fired the moment the attacker came into view. They reeled back in a cloud of black ash and from the side of his vision Corvo saw another enemy lunging for him.

Wheeling around, flipping the grip of his pistol in his hand so that he held the barrel, Corvo dodged the stab and smashed the firearm's butt into the throat of the assailant. They toppled to the floor, choking and wheezing, and Corvo ignored them as he turned to face a third, dodging a slash that would have taken his head from his shoulder. The Lord Protector grunted in pain as it scored a red line across his arm, parried the assassin's backswing and slammed his own blade into the man's gut.

Another stab sliced towards him from nowhere, Corvo whirling out of the way of the blade even as it sliced a red line across his side. His response was to slash across the attacker's throat, head flopping back with a spray of viscera as windpipe and tendons were severed.

No mortal force could have stopped Corvo Attano that day; even as fresh attackers appeared around the Lord Protector, he fought, blade weaving around him in an arc of graceful lethality. He was like a machine, a machine of terrifying precision and grace and fuelled a terrible determination to protect Emily and Jessamine with his life.

What stopped Corvo Attano was no mortal force.

Something grabbed him, an invisible hand that picked him up and pinned him to a pillar. He couldn't move, vainly attempting to struggle against the eldritch power humming in the hands of an assassin in a red coat. He couldn't even open his mouth as another figure, a killer without a gas mask, ripped out of thin air, blade in hand.

"Get back," Jessamine yelled, pushing Emily behind her. The assassin reached for Jessamine, and she slapped him away. The killer's free hand, encased in a glove of black leather, grabbed her wrist.

Blood spattered on the white stone floor of the gazebo as his blade stabbed into her midriff. Emily tried to break free but the killer who had Corvo pinned grabbed her around the waist, hoisting her up as the girl kicked and struggled.

"I've got her Daud, let's go!" the assailant said, a woman's voice audible even beneath the mask.

The man who had killed Jessamine glanced up at Corvo, and the Serkonan made a vow that the next time he looked upon that man's hard features, he would bury his blade in his heart. "Leave him."

The power holding Corvo in place abated, and he collapsed to the ground as the killers disappeared. Scrambling on his hands and knees, he hurried to where Jessamine was fallen, scooping her up in his arms, fingers scrabbling for a pulse as he muttered barely-audible denials. There, a beat, faint and feeling transient as a summer snowflake. She lived, she breathed. There was hope.

"Corvo," she managed to breathe, eyelids fluttering open. "Corvo, you need to...need to find Emily. Keep her safe. You're the only one who can...help her. Please."

Her eyes closed, the final beats of her pulse fading. Corvo tried to speak. He tried to form words, tried to say something, anything, make some final farewell.

The man who had been duelling with the skill and lethality of something born of the Void mere moments before, hadn't a single word to say.

When he looked up, he stared down the barrel of a musket. He blinked in surprise, at the Watchman who held the weapon and the platoon of his comrades who had fanned out around him, the maws of their pistols and muskets all gaping at Corvo like hungry predators. There were two more officers of the watch behind him, pistols in one hand, swords in the other, and behind them, Thaddeus Campbell and Hiram Burrows.

"He...he killed the Empress!" Burrows exclaimed, the tone on the Spymaster's voice so shocked that it could have been genuine.

"Her own bodyguard as well," Campbell added. "Ironic."

"Arrest him! Arrest him at once!" Hiram ordered. "Take him to Coldridge, immediately!"

Perhaps Corvo could have made it out of that situation. He was a seasoned killer, a veteran of combat, swift and lethal as a bolt from an arc pylon. Perhaps he could have fought his way free, dodged and rolled and evaded the bullets and blades, made his escape into the intestinal tangle of Dunwall's streets. A Corvo Attano who was not numb with shock, who had not seen his world crashing down around him in a single cataclysmic moment, might have achieved this. The Corvo Attano who lay on his knees, steeped in the blood of himself, assassins and the Empress, was not this man.

The hilt of a sword crashed against his temple, and darkness swallowed him like the Void.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 

_Two Months Later_

"You really are too kind, my dear," the old woman said as Jenny Aching handed her the basket, filled with enough food to last her the next few days. "Sometimes I simply don't know what I would do without you."

"That's me, Granny Rags," Jenny replied with a smile. "Looking out for people, that's all."

The old woman nodded, only half hearing what Jenny said. She clutched the basket in her hands like it was something sacred, a claw of brittle bone and pale skin closed around the handle.

"I have no idea how much it means to me, Delilah," she said. "You staying on with the household after all of the other servants left us, and all so suddenly. I must give you a raise some day; it's so hard to find servants as loyal and hardworking as yourself. I don't know how I'd manage in a house this size without your help."

Jenny looked up at the crumbling three-storey house that Granny Rags called home, a dying edifice of peeling plaster and rotting masonry. The third floor, she knew, was inaccessible since the staircase had collapsed under the weight of time, a combined effort of entropy and gravity bringing them down. Once again, she found she lacked the heart to correct the old woman.

"It's what I'm here for," Jenny said. "Do you need anything else, Granny Rags?"

"No, no, my dear, I'm quite alright," Granny rags shook her head. "Since you've been working so hard lately, why don't you have the night off? Here." She fished into her pocket and brought out a slightly bent bottlecap from a bottle of Thirsty Greg's beer. "Just a little tip for all of the hard work you've been doing."

"Thanks, Granny Rags," Jenny said, giving as gracious a smile as she could as she pocketed the small disc of metal. "Let me know if you need anything else."

"Of course, Delilah" Granny Rags said with a wrinkled, faded smile. Jenny had never worked out why the old woman had started calling her that, but guessed that Delilah must have been a maidservant of hers from when she had once been rich. "Off you go now, and have a nice night."

Jenny gave the old woman a smile and a wave as she stepped away onto the street, heading away from the old distillery, towards Clavering Boulevard. She got one or two odd looks as parted from the old house, from locals who knew about the old woman and street kids who thought she was a witch. Most people knew her as the girl who lived nearby, who helped the sad, senile old lady who lived alone in that crumbling house, a respectable local girl, one of their own lot. Even the Bottle Street gangers who loitered around the area gave her a nod as she passed; the last one who had given her trouble had ended up with a knife at his throat and a threat that his balls would be cut off. That had earned her the sort of don't-fuck-with-me reputation that violent men like them could respect.

Down the street went Jenny Aching, hard working girl and respected local lass. The sun was creeping towards the horizon and curfew approaching, but Jenny wasn't heading home. Chances were, she would be up all night.

She traversed a few more streets of the Distillery District, tall and thin houses of crumbling brick looming over her on one side, setting sun casting triangular rooftop patterns of grey and orange across the cobbles as if the shade had teeth. On the other side was the banks of the Wrenhaven, the breeze carrying the faint scent of sewage and whale blood.

She stopped at where a barrier of indigo steel was raised, cutting across the street like a cleaver. The houses on its side of the street had doors and windows blocked by the same metal, and the barrier extended out a little to the river, making sure that none could climb across. On the wall, someone had posted a notice; "_Danger. Plague zone. No trespassing. By order of the City Watch, those seen entering or leaving this area will be shot._"

Jenny simply checked that there was nobody about, but aside from a vagrant huddled sleeping in a bundle of rags in a nearby doorway there was nobody. No one wanted to live on the border of a condemned zone.

With a slight thump, she slid onto the rocks below, careful to keep her footing on the algae-slicked stone. She had done this a hundred times now, reaching for a chain that dangled on the far end of the wall with a strategically hooked stick. She hooked it on her first attempt, pulling it close to her, and hoisted herself up. Kicking off the wall, she swung around its far edge, swooping over the water where patches of rubbish floated like scabs,

Her boots scudded against the bank, onto cobbles much like the ones on the other side, these ones slick with algae. Once she was sure she was steady, she released the chain, pushing it to give it a little help in swinging back around to its original resting place. Reaching into her satchel, Jenny drew forth her pistol. Carrying it in her day to day life was risky, and if a Watchman found it on her such a thing would get her imprisoned, but out here in a condemned zone, where weepers and feral hounds prowled, going unarmed was even riskier.

Dunwall had always been a grubby city since the days of industrialisation, dirt and soot becoming ingrained into people and buildings alike, never washed out by the dampness of Gristol's clime. Three month of abandonment had done nothing to help this area, dereliction and rot gutting the district with the same brutal efficiency a butcher's cleaver. Smashed windows stared out onto the street, boarded up doorways looking like mouths that had been stitched shut. Weeds poked up between cobbles and paving stones, and rubbish and litter skittered about, man-made leaves in the breeze. The silence was oppressive and frightening.

Her progress was slow, creeping towards the centre of the district, ducking low and out of sight whenever she saw shambling figures congregating in the streets. They were like protestors gathered in a pathetic rally against their affliction, stumbling and milling about in one spot, uncertain and helpless. More than anything else, Jenny pitied them.

As she drew closer and closer to the centre of the district, a faint thumping began to become audible, as if some great heart were still beating in this condemned, forgotten place. She followed the noise, tracked the beat as it crept up in volume, until she finally came across a warehouse, a brick building with a slanting roof of corrugated iron.

Making sure no weepers were in sight, she darted across the street, boots scuffing the weeds that poked through the cobbles. She reached a wheel in the wall, below a balcony, and span it once, a ladder clattering down to meet her. Quickly, before the noise could attract any attention, Jenny clambered up, and once she was atop the balcony span the accompanying wheel, drawing the latter back up. It was not a particularly subtle disguise for the warehouse's entrance, but it was enough to stop the blunted intellect of a curious weeper.

Pushing open the door on the far end of the balcony, Jenny stepped inside the warehouse. Once, it had been a storage place for canisters of whale oil. After the plague had moved in, condemning the area to abandonment, the warehouse had been taken over by new tenants and repurposed. Hunched over like a mechanical worshipper to some obscure god of words, sheets of paper rolling over, under and through it, thumping a drumbeat of upheaval and protest, the printing press of _Dunwall's Voice_ worked away.

Jenny's boots clanged against the staircase that lead down into the main floor of the building as she descended. Stopping by a box already filled with pamphlets, Jenny read the headline emblazoned across the rough paper in cheap ink; "_OUR BELLIES EMPTY AS THEIR PURSES FILL!_" Beneath, an angry article talking of a rise in the price of bread, the third in as many weeks.

"So, what do you think?"

Jenny started, casting around her until she saw the young man with a crutch standing nearby her. He grinned at her, nodding at the headline and then poking his glasses back into place as the movement dislodged them.

"Pretty good headline, isn't it?" he said. "Came up with it all by myself."

"It's a good one," Jenny nodded. "Memorable."

"Thought so too," Delman Capson said, sole writer and editor of _Dunwall's Voice_. "Figured we could use something nice and rabble-rousing after a piece of news like this."

"It'll piss all the right people off, that's for certain," Jenny said.

"Who're the right people in this case? The toffs or the common people?"

Jenny snorted at that comment, shaking her head.

"Both, hopefully," she said. "Are the others ready to deliver it?"

"They're coming soon," Delman said. "Via the sewer route."

There was an uncomfortable look to him, Jenny realised, something nagging at him.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I..." Delman sighed. "Can we sit down first, please?"

"Of course," Jenny said. With the aid of his crutch, Delman limped away from the press on his clubbed foot, to the small lamp-lit room that served as the main office of _Dunwall's Voice_. It was scattered with pens, papers, daguerreotypes and the other detritus of journalism, and at the centre of its main desk was a typewriter, a half-written article for the next edition already in place halfway through its rollers. Delman took a seat with a grunt, resting his crutch against the desk.

"it's Hollison," he said. "They got him. Just today, I heard about."

Jenny was silent. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and the slowly, carefully exhaled.

"Shit," she said eventually. "How?"

"Georgina saw a couple of Watchmen stop him," Delman said. "He still had a whole load of copies of the _Voice _on him. It'll be charges of distributing seditious material, no doubt."

"Do you think they'll link him to the rest of us?" Jenny asked.

"No way of knowing," Delman said. "But Hollison's a stubborn son of a bitch; chances are he won't say anything."

"We can't take that risk," Jenny said. "Delman, can you take charge of the meeting tonight? I don't have anything I need to put out on the agenda, and you know the drill well enough by now."

"I...no," Delman said. He scrambled for his crutch and pushed himself to his feet as Jenny swept out of the room, limping in her wake. "No, no, no! Jenny, come back here, for the Outsider's sake!"

Jenny ignored him as she swept through the main hall of the warehouse, past the press, to a small, ignored cupboard on the far side of the room. She slid back the bolt and pulled the door back, and admired at its contents.

"Jenny, please," Delman begged from behind her. "You can't go out again. You're taking an insane risk doing this."

"Where did they take him?" Jenny asked.

"The Watch Station on the west bank of Kaldwin's Bridge," Delman said, then shook his head as he realised his mistake. "And I can't let you go there!"

"Delman," Jenny said, turning on her co-conspirator. "Which one of us is in charge of this operation?"

"You are," Delman mumbled, cowed by the sudden anger in her voice.

"I am," Jenny said. She took the contents of the draw and tucked them under one arm. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be taking the meeting room for a few moments. A lady needs her privacy."

Sweeping from the room, Jenny closed the door of the warehouse's improvised meeting room behind her. As he heard cloth rustling on the other side, Delman shook his head in despair. He shouldn't have aid anything, but then again, Jenny would have heard from the others in their small band of malcontents. They might have been enough to talk her out of doing anything reckless, though.

Inside, Jenny rolled her eyes in exasperation at Delman's timidness as she changed. He was a good writer, and she couldn't hope for a better person to pen the articles in _Dunwall's Voice_, but he was over-cautious in her eyes. Nobody was going to overthrow the increasingly tyrannical regime of the Lord Regent without steel in their spine and a willingness to die for the cause.

She strapped on the moth-eaten bodice of blood crimson that had become part of her signature attire, pulled on the deep red boots and trousers that made up the lower half of her costume. She slung the bandolier for a pistol and ammunition across her shoulder and strapped a belt around her waist, a sword strapped to it. A grappling hook and rope were wrapped crosswise to the bandolier, carefully placed so as not to slow her access to her weapon, and a lockpicking kit was placed in a satchel on her belt.

The final part of her attire was the most important. It was a ceramic mask, red like the rest of her costume, a sardonic, confident smile adorning its features and a strange symbol of a stylised circle with a diagonal line bisecting it resting on its forehead. There was nothing to cover the rest of her head, and instead Jenny kept her brown tied back in a ponytail so it wouldn't get in the way, but nobody noticed the hair. All people saw was the mask.

It was a special thing. One day, when she had been doing her best to keep the crumbling ruin of Granny Rags' house clean, she had found it in a cupboard, atop a moth-eaten crimson bodice, evidently the surviving remnants of a once fine ball gown. There was something about the mask that attracted her, something that whispered and promised with words she couldn't quite hear or understand. She had taken them down to Granny Rags, too overcome with curiosity to not ask.

"Oh, those old things?" the old woman had said. "Why, they were for the masquerade my husband and I threw for the Fugue Feast. I was the envy of every woman there that night. Why don't you take them, dear; I don't think I'm young enough to get away with wearing their like any more, but it would be something nice for you to have, wouldn't it?"

So perhaps Granny Rags was a sad, senile old lady who had a powerful artefact associated with the Outsider. So what? Everyone in Gristol carried charms of carven whalebone with them, for luck or protection or some more obtuse blessing.

Later that night, too curious to resist the temptation any longer, she had put on the mask, and for Jenny Aching, everything changed. Her steps were swifter and quieter, her leaps carried her farther, her eyes could cut through the darkness as if it were daylight. A costume had been assembled, a persona that took to Dunwall's streets at night, an anarchist imbued with the power of the occult. The first time she had been out, when she had killed a watchman who was marching a man to the local station for interrogation, nothing more than pretence for a beating and a robbing, she realised that this was what she truly was, that this was where she truly belonged.

The news she heard the next morning, of the Empress' assassination by the traitor Corvo Attano and Hiram Burrows assuming power 'for an indefinite period, until stability had returned to Dunwall', had seemed almost irrelevant at the time. In the face of what Jenny had discovered, such things were the embodiment of pettiness and unimportance.

"That thing creeps me out," Delman said as Jenny emerged in full attire apart from her mask, the piece of costume in her hand.

"I know," Jenny said. "You've said plenty of times, trust me."

"Look," Delman said, hobbling after her as Jenny mounted the stairs. "I doubt he'll talk. I know that it's harsh to leave him hanging out to dry, but it's like you said; we've got to make sacrifices. Not everyone's going to live through Burrows being overthrown."

"And if he does talk that'll spell disaster," Jenny retorted.

"What if they catch _you_?" Delman said. "We're fucked then, aren't we?"

Jenny paused from where she was about to open the door to the balcony.

"They won't catch me," she said, opening the door. "Trust me on that."

"And what'll you say when you get shot and killed, or clubbed unconscious and wake up in a torturer's chair?" Delman pressed. "Jenny, for the Void's sake, you can't go around risking your life like this all the time. It's one thing to appear at strikes and cause a stir, or maybe rough up some Watchmen who've overstepped their authority and are asking for it, but it's another thing to try and break someone out of a damn Watch station."

"If I don't do it, Delman, nobody will," Jenny said. "Now organise everyone for me while I'm gone. I'll be back by morning."

She closed the door and slipped on the mask. For a moment, she revelled in the exhilaration of her eyes sharpening, of strength flooding her limbs, her heart being filled with a new resolve and font of will. Donning the mask, she felt godlike, invulnerable. Nothing could stop her this night.

Red Jenny spun the wheel, slid down the ladder, and disappeared into the evening, ready to cause chaos.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

_One Month Later_

The echo of the gunshot inside his skull was what woke Lucas Cornell from his sleep. He blinked a few times, disorientated and hyperventilating, struggling for his bearings. Finally, he found them; at home, in his bed, the first rays of sun creeping through the curtains.

He checked the clock on the cabinet opposite him, and nodded. There were still five minutes to go before the alarm bell chimed and he would have to rise, and he took a moment to lie back in his bed. That moment was slow, and it ached.

The clock chimed, the noise enough to drag him out of memory and into the day. Thanking the device for the distraction, Lucas slid out of bed, flicked the alarm off for the next morning, and drew back the curtains. Weak natural light filtered through the window, Lucas blinking before it. Night-time rain had left the street slick and damp, as if it had just crawled from the womb of some abominable urban goddess, but there were already people in the cobbled roadways.

He carried out his morning routine in silence, dressing, eating a light breakfast, brushing his teeth, moving through his small, empty apartment without saying a word. There was nobody to say anything to, after all.

Once the short period of preparation was done, he stepped outside onto the street. He wasn't in his uniform at the moment, just some nobody in a long coat to ward off the chill and damp, hands tucked into his pockets. Nobody paid him any attention as he walked out of his small apartment building, locking the door behind him, making his way down the street.

He stopped by the mouth of an alleyway, a block away from his home, and reached into the inside of his pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a tin of brined hagfish, peeling the lid off, and placed it down by his feet.

"Jessie!" he called. "Here girl! C'mon!"

He whistled, and the call was answered by barking and the sound of hurrying paws. A dog hurried into the alleyway's mouth, tongue lolling and tail wagging, and Lucas crouched down by her as she came close, looking up at him with mute adulation and worship.

"Go on, girl," he said, ruffling the fur behind the dog's ears. "Tuck in."

Without further encouragement, the dog tucked in, wolfing down the contents of the tin and licking it clean in mere moments. Meal already finished, Jessie looked up at him, an expectant look in her eye, but Lucas just shook his head and smiled, petting her head.

"Hey now," he said. "Don't get greedy. I'll be back from work later, and I'll get some more food for you then."

Jessie barked her enthusiasm and followed him down the street as he went. Lucas had no idea exactly who Jessie belonged to, and he had called her Jessie only because she looked like a girl, but she had obviously had an owner before Lucas had adopted her; she was too tame to be one of the semi-feral street dogs that roamed some of Dunwall's backstreets, and she was, unless Lucas was very much mistaken, a purebred Tivean Sheephound. If it weren't for the fact that his landlady put a ban on keeping pets of any kind, he would have put the girl up in his apartment. The company would be pleasant, but as it was their current arrangement was working well enough.

They parted ways outside the local City Watch station, Jessie heading back into the streets that were her home and Lucas stepping through the front doors of the imposing brick building. His face was well known and he was let past the front desk without a word of challenge beyond the man behind the desk wishing him a good morning.

Taking his uniform from his locker and changing quickly, Captain Lucas Cornell of the City Watch was finally fully ready to face his day. It decided that it would start busy and go from there.

"We've got another attack carried out by Red Jenny and her friends," was Captain Urdan's answer to Lucas' enquiries about what had happened the previous night. The man was grimy from pulling a busy all-nighter, eyes bloodshot and shadowed from lack of sleep. A faint crop of stubble darkened his chin. "We had a cart full of weapons attacked; the two watchmen driving it were killed, and everything on board was taken. There was more than three thousand Coin's worth of muskets, pistols, grenades and ammunition on board that cart, and they took it all."

"How do you know that it was Red Jenny's work?" Lucas asked. In response, Urdan slid a wicker picnic basket across to him. Frowning, Lucas pulled the lid up to reveal loaves of bread, and on top of them, a note.

_'Your weapons have been requisitioned for a just cause. Give these to the people instead of your bullets. Kindest regards, Red Jenny._'

"Outsider damn the crazy bitch," Lucas cursed. "Any witnesses?"

"None, or at least there aren't any who'll say anything against her," Urdan said. "Lord Commander's gonna have my head for this."

He shook his head.

"Remember when this job used to be easy?"

"Hah," Lucas snorted. "I'm still longing for the days when the worst we had to deal with was ganger trouble. No weepers, no rioters, no revolutionaries."

"Well, I've got some good news, at least," Urdan said. "The first shipment of Sokolov's new toys came in. They're trying them out in the yard. C'mon, let me show you."

The sight that greeted Lucas in the yard was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Standing fifteen feet in height atop two spindly legs, an armoured nest protecting the single pilot, a group of machines walked the Watch Station's yard. The men atop the platforms had bows in their hands and the weapons would have been anachronistically archaic in comparison to their mounts if it weren't for the fact that Lucas could see they were tipped with cartridges of explosive whale oil.

"Tallboys, they call 'em," Urdan said. "This was the 'riot suppression measure' we were all promised."

"How many do we have?" Lucas asked, watching one of the machines step over a pair of spectating watchmen in a single immense stride.

"Half a dozen, with more to come."

"That's a measure that'll suppress riots, alright," Lucas said. "They'll be enough to stop them before they start."

"Exactly the point. The intimidation factor on those things is through the roof, and even if it doesn't scare people off then it can rip through a crowd in no time."

"Y-yes," Lucas managed to nod. "That would be a good thing too, I suppose. Who's piloting those? Are we going to need to rework shifts if we've got men on Tallboy duty?"

"The pilots came in from outside the station," Urdan replied. "They've been having special training in these for the last couple of months, top secret stuff that they've been doing in Dunwall Tower."

Lucas gave a grimace of disapproval.

"Everything alright?" Urdan asked.

"Rather have men who know the area piloting those things, that's all," Lucas said.

"Not as if we're going to be sending those things out on patrol," Urdan pointed out. "Exceptional circumstances only, that sort of thing."

He blinked, as if remembering something.

"Thinking of special circumstances, Commander Tellerson said he wanted to see you," he added. "Said that there was an assignment he had for you, to see him as soon as you could."

Lucas nodded.

"I'll see him right away," he said. "Talk to you later, Urdan."

"Hah, fat chance," Urdan retorted. "My shift's over, I'm heading home."

"Alright then, tomorrow," Lucas said. He headed into the interior of the station, the bustling mix of whitewashed corridors, cells, offices, Watchmen and prisoners. There was the sound of bellowed threats from one cell, of a man yelling in pain and pleading for mercy, and Lucas shook his head. The Watch had changed since he had first joined, and he was beginning to feel more and more that it hadn't changed for the better.

He came to a halt before the door of Commander Tellerson's office, and rapped his knuckles on the oak.

"Come in," the Commander's voice rasped from the other side. Door creaking as he pushed it open, Lucas entered. "Ah, Captain Cornell, I was expecting you."

The body of Commander Tellerson was that of a man who had, in his prime, been the height of strength and athleticism; tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. Now, with the advance of age, those muscles had turned to fat, his hair had greyed and the pipe he had favoured for decades had left his voice as a deep rasp.

Standing behind the Commander to his left was another figure, wearing the crimson uniform and sneering golden mask of an Overseer.

"Sir," Lucas saluted. "Who's this?"

"Patrir Balkin," the Overseer said, stepping forwards with a hand extended. Lucas shook it. "A pleasure to meet you, Captain Cornell."

"And you too," Lucas replied. "What's this about, Commander? I take it Overseer Balkin's here for more than just a social visit."

"You're quite correct, Captain," Tellerson said, moustache wobbling as he spoke. "I'm assigning you new duties; the apprehension of the anarchist known as Red Jenny."

"The Abbey of the Everyman has reason to suspect that she traffics with the Outsider," Balkin answered before Lucas could ask the inevitable question. "Naturally, we wish to have her detained and executed for heresy, and I was assigned the task of hunting her down by the Abbey. I knew the City Watch also wished to have her taken in, so it made sense to me that we should pool our resources instead of conducting separate investigations; the Watch may know things the Abbey may not, and vice versa, and it reduces the risk of us accidentally treading on each other's toes."

"I see," Lucas said. "What does this have to do with me?"

"All to do with our break-in last month when she sprang her friend," Tellerson said. "You're the only member of the Watch to have encountered her face-to-face and lived."

"Indeed," Balkin added. "I requested that you might help me in this assignment. That, and your prior history with dealing with riots and strikers means that you may well have an insight on the revolutionary mindset that I lack."

"I've given you access to all of the reports we have on Red Jenny to help you both," Tellerson said. "May be that you find something useful."

"Thank you, Commander," Balkin said. "Unless there is something the captain wishes to speak to you about, then I do not see any reason to use up any more of your time."

Tellerson glanced to Lucas.

"Nothing else to add, sir," the Captain said. "We'll get to work."

"So," Lucas said to Balken as they stepped into the corridor. "How are we doing this?"

"The investigation?" Balken asked, looking at him with Lucas guessed was a curious expression beneath the sneering countenance of his mask. "The usual manner, I had thought; conducting interviews, reviewing evidence, attempting to work out where she would appear next, that sort of thing."

"No, no, not that," Lucas shook his head. "I meant us two. Is this something you're determined to take charge of?"

"On the contrary, I would much rather we worked together as partners and equals," Balken said. "You are experienced in hunting criminals, and I am experiences in hunting occultists. Seeing as we are hunting a criminal occultist, neither of us really has any precedent for taking charge over the other."

"Works for me," Lucas nodded. At least the Balken was fairly intelligent, it seemed; he had worked with Overseers before, when the Watch had had to collaborate with them on some matters, and those men had been blinkered, frothing-at-the-mouth lunatics. It was still possible that Balken was as zealous as the others and had merely tempered that zeal with a little humility, but whales might have just grown wings and flown and he could have found himself partnered with a reasonable Overseer. "Do you have an office or anything here, Overseer?"

"I'm afraid I don't," Balken said. "And please, just call me Patrir."

"Well, we might as well use mine for this, then," Lucas said. "We'll get everything relevant from the archives and bring it up here, see what we can find out. And call me Lucas, by the way."

Their visit to the station's archives and evidence room was not a long one, the pair picking up the files that had been compiled on Red Jenny as well as the latest few editions of _Dunwall's Voice_ that had been confiscated.

"Any reason why you're picking up that seditionist little rag, Lucas?" Balken asked.

"It's only ever been a hunch, but I'm pretty sure the _Voice_ and Red Jenny are linked," Lucas explained as he led the way to his office. "She's always seen at the rallies or strikes that the _Voice _incites, and they portray her as some kind of hero for the people. Might just be mutual interest, but it could be a chance to work out where she's going to appear next."

"Good thinking," Balken nodded.

They reached Lucas' office, and the captain pushed the door open. It was a carefully kept, neat room, uncluttered and clean, with a few mementos on his desk but little else.

"Tell me, captain, when you faced down Red Jenny, did you see anything to suggest any Outsider affiliation?" Balken asked. "Anything uncanny or not right about her?"

"She was a lot stronger and a lot quicker than I expected," Lucas said. "We went sword-to-sword when I ran into her, and she took me by surprise with that."

"Unnaturally so?"

"Maybe unnatural wouldn't be quite the right word to describe it, but she was an amateur. She lacked technique. A master swordsman would have had her level of speed and strength, but I'm talking about someone who's trained from when they were young and she definitely hasn't. Technique was the reason that I survived, and if she hadn't shot me I might have actually beaten her."

He rubbed his right shoulder at that, at the deep furrow that the bullet had dug along it. It wasn't a debilitating injury, but it had been enough for him to drop his weapon and stun him; Red Jenny had taken the opportunity to flee with her rescued comrade.

"I see," Balken said. "And do you think you saw anything that might have given her such abilities?"

"I can't say for certain, but you know that mask she wears? I got a funny feeling whenever I looked at it. It could have been that which was giving her that advantage."

"Her mask," Balken nodded. "I see. It would make sense; the Outsider and its followers are known to have a fondness for such things."

"If that is the case, do you have to counter that?" Lucas asked. "You Overseers are the ones who are specialised in dealing with magic, after all."

"There is something we have," Balken nodded, drawing what looked like a small music box from his pocket. He pulled open the lit and his thumb flicked a lever, and a discordant chime echoed from it. "It has only just recently been developed, but this little device can temporarily disable Outsider magic; if we use it on Red Jenny it should be enough to put her at a disadvantage and make it possible to apprehend her."

"Yeah, I can see how that would be useful," Lucas nodded. He tapped the files and the small box of _Dunwall's Voice _copies on his desk. "Now let's see if we can track her down."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Dunwall lay upon the banks of the Wrenhaven River like a beached whale, huge and mighty and dying. Smoke poured from the chimneys of its factories, the monolithic edifices of industry vomiting a chemical sputum of industrial waste into the river as they forged the products demanded by the city's people. These huge structures were surrounded by smaller buildings of brick, houses and shops and pubs interconnected by cobbled streets; some of these roads were orderly, planned, but others had arisen from ancient pathways that had not been made with urbanisation in mind, and began a tangled gut of alleyways and cul-de-sacs. Railway lines crisscrossed the city like scars, cutting across it on their way out of Dunwall to the rest of the isle of Gristol. Barbarous mechanical gods of shrieking pistons and belching chimneys, the trains made their way to and from the city, carrying goods with them. They passed through Sokolov's Walls of Light on their way out, leaving any living creature not correctly charged incinerated into ash. Rats and people that stowed away, on their way to escape the city, became small, sad piles of black dust and nothing more.

The city was a leper, peppered with rotten districts that had been abandoned to the ever-encroaching plague. The rich spent their days in their mansions and estates, surrounding themselves with guards and machines, watching the city for any signs of creeping malady, ready to move should sickness rear its head. The poor, unprotected, unable to uproot, simply uttered the mathematically-derived logic prayers of the Abbey of the Everyman or thumbed charms and runes of carven whalebone to beseech the Outsider for His esoteric protections.

And always, the whaling ships left the estuary and returned with huge beasts trussed in metal harness on their slaughter decks. The ships visited no other ports than the Wrenhaven's now (and those that had dared others had been sunk by the shelling of naval vessels and shore guns, so strong had the fear of the rat plague been), but they entered and left in any case. Dunwall was sickening, but it was an addict, constantly demanding more and more whale oil to fuel its insatiable appetites, a huge industrial wampyr gorging itself on blood and blubber. Once at the city's shores, the corpses were hauled into immense slaughter factories, the oil was refined and processed into fuel and that was sent out to the city.

Much of this went to factories, where it was used as fuel for the machinery that drove industry. Some of these machines were useful, benevolent providers of light and warmth. Others made products that were less gentle in their aspect; arc pylons, walls of light, automatic watchtowers. Outside one of these factories, one that constructed arc pylons, a crowd was gathered, a large crowd, an angry crowd, and this was something that made Jenny Aching very pleased indeed.

_GIVE US A SAFER WORKPLACE NOW!_ one striker's placard demanded. _BETTER WAGES_ was the strident, blunt call from another. Gathered in picket in a square before their workplace, the workers at Templeton Manufacturing jeered and yelled at the City Watchmen who stood in opposition to their picket. It was hundreds against dozens, but the Watchmen were armed with muskets and grenades and had a squad of Overseers with them, the masked zealots equally well equipped and trained as their contemporaries in the Watch. The Abbey of the Everyman's enforcers had their infamous wolfhounds with them, the dogs snarling and straining against their leashes in bloodlust.

"They're all in position, Jenny," Stanner said, the skinny urchin-turned-revolutionary somehow finding her through the crowd. "We're just waiting on your signal, that's all."

"Good," Jenny nodded, red costume covered by a coat, mask tucked out of sight for the moment. "We'll wait to see if Templeton's going to come out and try to speak to his workers or if the Watch bastard in charge of these blueboys is going to tell everyone to get to work. I'll get the crowd worked up against them, and when the Watch starts shooting, we open up. They'll fire the first shots; we'll fire the last."

She'd seen that line scrawled on a wall somewhere, or a similar piece of rhetoric, and she'd liked it. Graffiti could be an inspiring thing, at times.

From his place in the line of Watchmen, Patrir shook his head as he lowered his spyglass.

"Still no sign of Red Jenny," he said to Lucas. "If she's in the crowd then she must be waiting for something."

"The right moment," Lucas said. "Keep an eye on the crowd and get ready to go after her as soon as she appears. Corporal Rheese?"

"Yessir?" the watchman crouched next to the large voxwaver machine asked.

"Get ready to order the suppression teams in," Lucas said. "On my command. And remember; make it clear to them that they aren't to fire unless it's expressly at my signal."

"Got it, captain," the corporal said.

"Captain! Captain!"

The call came from a newcomer, a thin man in an immaculate suit hurrying along the rear of the line of watchmen. There was an expression of anger on his face, and as he approached an enraged, quivering finger was jabbed towards the strikers.

"What is the meaning of this?" Tampthis Templeton demanded.

"We're controlling the strikers and attempting to disperse the crowd," Lucas said. "The situation hasn't changed in the last hour."

"Indeed it hasn't," Templeton fumed. "And why in the world is that? Just shoot some of the lazy scum and get the rest into my factory."

"You _want_ my men to shoot your workers?"

"If you want to call this bone-idle band of lackwits 'workers', then yes, I want you to shoot some of them."

"Why?"

"They're factory workers." This was said as if it were an answer in and of itself, as if working in a factory made one eligible to serve as human target practice at a moment's notice. "The lot of them are ill-educated and work-shy and the only reason they're upset is because some damn rabble rouser's got them all worked up. All it'll take is a round of bullets and they'll break."

Lucas shot a doubtful look at the crowd of angry, grub-ingrained men, women and children gathered in front of the factory.

"There are children in that crowd, Mr Templeton," he said.

"And what of it?" Templeton asked. "They're as bad as their parents. There are more people in want of work in this city, captain, I'll have you know, and every minute they spend out here is a minute cutting into my profit margins."

"We'll get them into your factory, Mr Templeton," Lucas replied.

"Well what are you waiting for?"

"The right person."

"Then tell them to hurry up, damn you."

Lucas sighed.

"Just let me do my job, Mr Templeton," he said. "Wait behind us, and we'll try and get these picketers inside peacefully."

"Hah, good luck with that."

Raising the loudspeaker he carried to his mouth, Lucas spoke.

"Attention, workers of Templeton Manufacturing," he announced. "Your picket is in direct contravention of the laws and ordnances of Dunwall City. Disperse and return to your workplaces immediately, or I will be compelled to use lethal force."

"Fuck you, blueboy!" some factory man shouted, made anonymous in the crowd.

"This is your only warning," Lucas said. "Return to your work stations."

"They're not going anywhere!"

Somehow, the voice was carried over the crowd despite the fact that it had no amplifier. Something red bobbed up above the heads of the strikers, and it took only a moment for Lucas to see who it was. A glance at Patrir confirmed that the Overseer was already moving, the contingent of zealots beginning to move towards the crowd, batons and hounds ready to force the strikers back. All Lucas needed to do was keep Red Jenny in place before she noted the Overseers.

"Well, look who it is!" another voice interjected, sneering and mocking. Lucas looked over, wondering who the new speaker was; Templeton, stepping forth from the line of watchmen. "The woman who wants to put all of my valued workers out of a job."

"You don't treat these people as if they're worth a One of Coin!" Red Jenny shot back. "I want these men and women to work, Templeton, but unlike you, I care about whether or not their job kills them!"

That got her a cheer of support from the crowd.

"I want these people to have coin to take home to their families!" Red Jenny said. "I want them to have elixir to protect them from the plague! I want them to have jobs, I want them to have work, but I don't want them risking their lives to feed their families!"

Again, there was another cheer from the crowd. Some of them had seen the Overseers, and the Abbey's enforcers were met with shoving bodies. Lucas saw one of the men yell in pain and clutch a shoulder as a cobblestone smacked right into it. Their hounds snarled and their batons thudded wet against flesh, but the crowd was thick, angry, pushing back. There was no way they'd get to Jenny in time.

"Corporal Rheese," Lucas called over the Watchman. "Send them in."

"Yessir," Rheese replied. He activated the voxwaver and began to signal them in.

"No death for coin!" Red Jenny called from the crowd. "No death for coin!"

The chant was taken up by the crowd. "No death for coin! No death for coin!"

Any minute now, Lucas knew, things would turn violent. The picket was churning, roaring, a beast of people that was growing territorial and enraged. If, when, it turned violent, Watch muskets would crack and it would be a massacre.

"No death for coin! No death for coin!"

"Hurry up, you bastards," Lucas muttered. He could see Patrir's overseers rebuffed once more, slowed as they pulled a beaten and bloodied comrade who had been briefly swallowed by the mob.

"No death for coin! No death for coin!"

"Captain, shoot them, damn you!" Templeton called. "They aren't going to listen to reason!"

"No death for coin! No death for coin!"

_Click-thump_.

The noise wasn't particularly loud or intrusive, but it gave some the strikers pause, made them hesitate, look at each other, made them ask themselves; "_What was that?_"

"No death for coin! No death...for..."

The chant faded, ran out of momentum and stopped like an audiograph being switched off mid-tune. Each step from their pointed metal crow feet punching holes in the road or splitting paving slabs, the silencers of the crowd approached, six tallboys with taut bows stomping down the streets. Murmurs of consternation, curiosity, alarm rippled through the crowd. The beast of the mob was cowed as it came face to face with an apex predator, and the Overseers moved without impediment. Flicking back into the crowd as the tallboys approached, the mask of Red Jenny disappeared. Lucas cursed.

"Jenny, Jenny!" Stanner called, pushing through the crowd around the revolutionary, stepping around the barrel she had stood on. "What do we do?"

Jenny glanced around at the cowed crowd, noticing many of them were beginning to glare at her as if the appearance of these machines was her fault, then back at the six imposing walkers that had entered the square before the factory, backing the Watchmen and hemming the strikers in. The rest of the small band of anarchists commanded had been waiting in position on rooftops and in windows, ready to fire on the blueboys and lob grenades into their ranks as soon as the Watch inevitably turned violent, but in the face of these new threats she doubted stolen muskets and grenades would be sufficient.

"Let's get out of here," she said. She pulled something from inside her jacket and tossed it up above her head. Moments later, the firecracker immolated itself in a bright red flare, distracting the crowd enough for Jenny to pull the mask off, hide it away and tug her disguise back on. The message of the flare was to sound a retreat; she knew that the rest of her band would be retreating from their perches on rooftops and windows, running to boltholes, and her and Stanner did the same.

They didn't run down the streets, blocked as they were by the fantastical stalk-legged nightmare machines of the Watch, instead darting into a side-alley where they were unnoticed. For the first few blocks, they sprinted, glancing around them in wary anticipation of some Watch interceptor, but by the time they were out of there, they slowed, stopping and running and walking together nonchalantly through the busier streets.

"What the hell were those?" Stanner hissed as they made their way through the street crowd.

"No idea," Jenny replied. They stopped as a railcar hissed and clattered and clanked past, deep blue steel and belligerence barrelling down the middle of the road. "Something new, though. As if the Arc Pylons and Walls of Light weren't bad enough."

"Void, those things look like they could make a mess," Stanner said, half to Jenny and half to himself. "Wouldn't want to go up against them."

"That's what we're going to do, though," Jenny said.

"You what?"

"The Watch want to escalate things," Jenny said. "They're going to push against us harder and harder until we fall. We've got two options, Stanner; we keel over, or we push back."

"You're crazy, Jenny," Stanner said.

"You going against me, Stanner?" Jenny asked. The subordinate of Red Jenny looked into the eyes of his boss, saw the determination, the zeal that would match any Overseer's, and realised that if he tried to back out of this he was dead.

"N-no," he said. "'Course not."

"Good," Jenny nodded. "In that case, we're going to escalate things too. We're going to make the Watch's life very unpleasant indeed."


	5. Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

_This is the story of three people, two masks, and one city. _

_At this moment in time, you might be forgiven for thinking that is only a story of two people. It is true that the lives of Jenny Aching and Lucas Cornell become linked together far earlier than whey they are conjoined with that of Corvo Attano, but rest assured that he shall enter our narrative very soon. For now, the man who is thought by the world as the killer of an empress is in Coldridge Prison, tortured and unyielding. The man who really killed Jessamine Kaldwin dreams uneasy, fitful dreams of what he did. Right now, he is bloodying his blade for me one last time, but that is a story for another day. _

_For now, we must focus once more on Jenny Aching. This scene is set just under six months after the death of Empress Kaldwin, and at this moment in time Red Jenny and her fellow anarchists are about to meet. This is a time of many clandestine meetings in shadowy places, but this one is important, so important that it cannot go without mentioning. If it had never taken place then, I suspect, things would have gone far, far differently for Dunwall. _

Jenny Aching's eyes flickered open, and she pushed herself up into a sitting position in the bed. Beside her, still asleep, Delman muttered something indecipherable at the disturbance and shifted, tugging at the sheet.

On the cabinet by the bed the two lovers shared, in one of the side rooms of their publishing house-come-headquarters, the hands of the clock atop it showed it was half past six. It was time to get up, greet the day and work out where and what to strike next.

She let Delman sleep a while longer, pulling on clothes; a shirt, a long skirt, a waistcoat of cheap brown cloth and a strip of material to pull her hair back, completely unremarkable garb that left her looking like nobody at all.

Someone had put an audiograph on, a pianist's take on a lilting tavern song echoing through the main warehouse instead of usual thumping beat of the press. Right now, the printing device was inert, and Jenny fancied it as a huge sleeping beast, curled up on itself, soon to wake once more and roar forth a cry of ink and paper and rebellion.

"Anyone around?" Jenny called.

"Over here," came a reply. The speaker was obscured by the bulk of the press, but Jenny recognised it as Taldin's. The former watchman was on the other side, loading a small tank of whale-oil gas into a portable stove at the warehouse's small communal area, and Kannis was at the table, reading one of the books she read near constantly.

Kannis and Taldin had been with Jenny from the beginning, when she had been nothing more than a malcontent with a mask. Taldin had deserted the watch after one too many shifts keeping Weepers from breaking out of the Flooded District, enraged and disillusioned by the massacre of sick people and the Lord Regent's apathy towards them. His knowledge of the Watch had proved essential, key to evading and outwitting patrols, and it had been him who trained Jenny's small squad of revolutionary fighters in how to use weapons effectively.

Kannis was a different matter. She claimed to be a witch, a disgraced member of a coven, banished for an indiscretion that she would not disclose. Her magic lay in street spells, the woman working as an urban mystic who found hidden byways and nooks in alleyways and buildings, traversing Dunwall swiftly and silently; her claims of magical ability had been mocked at first by other members of the group, but such derision had ended on the day when she had killed three Watchmen through arcane butchery, the strange rose-and-thorn tattoos covering her arms whipping out with barbed vines to lacerate and strangle the lawmen. The question of how she had found Jenny's band and why she had run to her had been answered cryptically; '_Aside from you, there is only one other in this city who has the power to protect me from the woman in charge of my coven, and I know that he will not help me._' She was fascinated by the mask Jenny wore.

"You want some eggs?" Taldin asked. "I was just going to fry some up for breakfast."

"If you're cooking some, then yes please," Jenny said, taking a seat near the small whale oil generator that powered everything in the base but the press; the condemned neighbour of the Distillery District they were set up in had had yletric power cut off from it long ago when the plague had moved in, and instead the warehouse was lit and heated by a portable generator and pilfered tanks of whale oil. The press, appetite for energy too huge to be sated by the small generator, was fuelled with oil casks that were plugged directly into the machine.

"Are we having a distribution run today?" Taldin asked.

"We always have a distribution run on Songdays," Kannis said, not looking up from her book. "Why would today be any different?"

"I was just asking," Taldin said. "If we're doing this then we should probably get going soon; we'll want to get the _Voice _out before _Outcry_ hits the streets."

"For the last time, Taldin," Jenny said. "_Outcry_ aren't our rivals. We're both on the same side."

"Yeah, but we were here first," Taldin protested. "They're just copying us."

"Considering our circulation is easily ten times larger than theirs, I don't think that that's a big problem," Kannis said. "Besides, _Outcry_ are good for getting the middle classes more stirred up over things; they're more moderate, after all."

"Lacking commitment, more like," Jenny said.

_Outcry _was one of half a dozen pamphlets that had begun circulation in Dunwall over the past few months. The _Voice _was, far and away, the most popular one in the city, distributed for free through clandestine means of dead-drops, code words and a network of suppliers to whom information was fed carefully and with immense scrutiny. With rising discontent of the Lord Regent's increasingly tyrannical rule and the conversion of newspapers into nothing more than propaganda for his regime, an underground publishing ring of renegade journals and anti-authoritarian pamphlets had been born. There were others; the union-focussed _Unity_, _Sanctifier_, which believed that Hiram Burrows' reign was in breach of the Seven Strictures and was printed by dissidents of the Abbey of the Everyman and _Sledgehammer_, a ganger and street ruffian piece that advocated violent rebellion straight away. Of all the non-_Voice_ pamphlets, Jenny liked that one the best; their Ten Ways to Gut a Watch Pig article had been an entertaining read.

"You two sleep alright?" Jenny said, noting the dark circles under Kannis' eyes.

"Like a log," Taldin said.

"I didn't," Kannis answered. "Strange dreams, bad ones. Something happened at my old coven, or is about to happen, and the Outsider is laughing at them all."

Taldin shot her a strange look, but Kannis didn't seem to notice.

"Anything that might affect us?" Jenny asked.

"I don't know," Kannis said. "Perhaps, perhaps not; it's beyond my ability to tell."

"Just keep me informed," Jenny said. "I mean, hopefully it won't be a problem for us, but if it is then-"

"Hey, Jenny!"

The shout came from the upstairs balcony, from the warehouse's street entrance, and Jenny stood to see Stanner up there. Next to him was a dark-skinned woman in a deep crimson rain-slick, a sword at her belt and some kind of strange device on her left wrist.

"Who's that?" Jenny asked, as Stanner and his companion made their way down the stairs. "Why in the void are you bringing some stranger here?!"

"Jenny, Jenny, calm down," Stanner said, raising his hands. "Listen, this is an old friend of mine, I can vouch for her. Just listen to her, trust me on this."

"Explain yourself," Jenny demanded of the newcomer.

"My name is Billie Lurk," the woman said. "And I've got some information you might want to hear."

#

They met in what had been dubbed 'The War Room'. In reality, it was nothing more than an old storage room, but the small group under the command of Red Jenny had converted it into a meeting space and planning area. Maps of Dunwall and plans for attacking and undermining the Lord Regent were dominant here, pinned to the walls or to wheeled chalkboards. Mounted on the wall above the head of the table, in pride of place above where Jenny's space, was a compound bow taken from a felled Tallboy.

Including Jenny and the newcomer, there were a dozen of them around the table; Delman, Stanner, Kannis and Taldin, with them others. Hollison, a former ganger with enough fight for three men in him, eternally loyal to Jenny after she had broken him out of a Watch station. There was Mercin, a skinny academic from the Academy of Natural Philosophy who had studied under Anton Sokolov, but had turned his mechanical expertise to undermining the Lord Regent instead of supporting him as his tutor had. There was Kroma, a Morleyan who fought for Red Jenny less because she cared for Dunwall but more because of her hatred of Gristol's government and her desire to refight the battles of the Morley Insurrection. Palna and Rolda, siblings who had found the group while seeking revenge for their sister being disappeared by the Watch and Trevali, a Serkonan-descended man who may have been a pirate or may have been a Naval Marine and who was a marksman without peer, with a great disinclination towards speech.

They were the core of the movement, a squad that had half-jokingly dubbed themselves 'The Jennies' and wore crimson masks. There were others, of course, but the people gathered here were the most trusted, the only ones who knew about the warehouse. It was they who, under Jenny's leadership, had orchestrated a dozen acts of sabotage against the Lord Regent. The Fenside Raid, where the distraction of three simultaneous riots across the Wrenhaven's north shore had given the Jennies cover to raid and loot a Watch armoury and come away with a veritable arsenal of stolen weapons, including muskets, explosives, mortars and even an Arc Gun; a bullet from Trevali's rifle had taken out a Watch Commander when the rest of the Jennies had fallen on his railcar and bodyguard and forced him into the sniper's sights; the Dimcreek Strikes, where strikers had been protected by Watch brutality by the intervention of Red Jenny and her crew. More than once, Dunwall had been rocked by the blasts of their hand-made bombs.

With the one exception of Delman, the propagandist who was held back by his malformed foot, every one of the Jennies knew how to kill, were deadly and determined. They were an intimidating audience, especially with Jenny Aching herself at their head, but the newcomer, Lurk, was unbowed.

"So this is the newcomer, then?" Hollison asked, the ganger's arms folded in an expression of how unimpressed he was. "The one Stanner thought would be a good idea to bring?"

"Yes, she is," Jenny said. "Alright, Lurk, you've got one chance to convince that shooting you for knowing too much is a bad idea. One chance, so make the most of it."

Surprisingly, that got her a derisive snort.

"Alright then," Lurk said. "If you want to have a good reason as to why I won't go running to tell the Lord Regent about you, then let me give you one; I'm a Whaler, and he'd have me killed."

"A whaler?" Mercin asked. "One of the assassins? Those are just a myth."

"They're not," Kannis said. "My old coven has clashed with them before, more than once." She saw the look Lurk gave her. "I'm not with them anymore. And I'm guessing from the fact that you're here, you're not with the Whalers either."

"Not anymore," Lurk shook her head. "I had a...disagreement with the man who is in charge of them and I was exiled. I needed one of two things, a way out of the city or some coin, so I contacted some people. Stanner hinted that he might be able to get me in touch with someone who could help me, and eventually he led me here."

"How do you two know each other then?" Jenny asked, nodding at Lurk and Stanner.

"We knew each other when we was kids," Stanner answered. "Kept in touch; I gave Billie information when she needed it, that sort of thing."

"Stanner was the best ear I had on the streets," Lurk added.

"He still is," Jenny said. "That's why we keep him around. So, what do you want from us?"

"Coin, and a place to lay low," Lurk said. "In return, I can give you the skills I learnt as a Whaler."

"Useful," Jenny nodded. "But to be honest, that doesn't make you invaluable."

"Anyway," Delman said. "If it's true about you being an outcast of this order of elite killers, why would you stay in the city? If I were in your position, I'd be getting out of the city."

"Don't want to leave," Lurk replied. "Dunwall is my home; I grew up here, and right now I'm seeing it die around me. Feels wrong to abandon it now. Besides, the Whalers are running out of time, have been ever since we took out the Empress; that moment changed everything, my old master especially."

"Your people killed the Empress?" Taldin demanded, the former Watchman grabbing the sword at his belt. The burly man stepped forwards before the others could react, weapon raised. "You fucking bitch! So it's your damn fault the entire city's gone to-"

Lurk moved. Exactly what she did was hard to tell, but one moment she standing before the table, and the next she was standing by Taldin, the revolutionary on his knees. His sword clattered from nerveless fingers from where Lurk held him in an arm lock of some kind, Taldin cursing in pain and impotent fury. The barrels of half a dozen pistols were aimed at her, and she felt the pressure of a barrel pressing into the back of her head from the weapon Jenny had pulled from its holster.

"Ah," Lurk said.

"Lower your weapons, everyone," Jenny ordered. There was a moment's hesitation. "Lower them."

The barrels of the pistols crept down, slow and cautious.

"Now, Billie, I'm going to ask you to let Taldin go in a moment," Jenny said. "And when that happen, Taldin, step away from her, and leave your sword where it is."

"But she...she killed the Empress!" Taldin managed to protest, voice halfway to a pained, unintelligible grunt.

"Taldin, do as I say," Jenny said.

"And if I don't let him go?" Lurk asked.

"Then I shoot you in the head," Jenny replied. Her voice was flat and smooth as a puddle of spilled whale oil. "This is something I don't particularly want to do, because Stanner brought you here and while he can sometimes be thicker than an inbred hagfish, I still trust his judgement. He thinks you're valuable and can be useful, and I want to see if he's right. So let Taldin go, and Taldin, please don't do anything stupid."

Lurk's grip was released, and Taldin half-stumbled, half-crawled back, cursing quietly and rubbing his injured hand, helped up by Rolda and Mercin. Jenny's pistol lowered.

"You've got a good 'holding people at gunpoint' voice, you know," Lurk remarked, taking a step away from Jenny and turning to face her. "I like that."

"I've had practise," Jenny shrugged, holstering the weapon. "Now, you mentioned information. What is this?"

Stanner grinned and rubbed his hands together in glee.

"Tell 'er, Billie," he said.

"Yes, please do," Jenny added.

"As well as killing the Empress-" Lurk began. Taldin spat at her feet, an action which earned him a glare. "As well as killing the Empress, the Whalers also abducted Emily Kaldwin. We handed her over Morgan and Custis Pendleton, who took her to a location that they decided not to disclose to us. Of course, the Whalers knew that she was a potential bargaining chip, so my master had me follow them as they went on their way."

She smiled at them all.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I know where Emily Kaldwin is, and I am willing to help you take her from the Lord Regent."

* * *

**Apologies for the exposition-heavy chapter, but there was a lot of ground to cover and I wanted to get it all covered in this one. Next chapter, we finally (****_finally!_****) get some Corvo action!**

**Also, because I'm desperate for self-validation, if you read this then please let me know what you think! The review box is right there, just to the lower right of this text. Go on, click it! Type in it! Go!**


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